Tag Archives: US politics

A US bank chairman has pleaded guilty to using bailout money given to rescue his firm to buy himself a luxury home. Darryl Woods used $381,000 (£245,000) of the $1m given to his Mainstreet Bank to buy the Florida waterfront property. Following the US housing collapse and financial crash, Mainstreet needed to be propped up […]

The head of the US tax agency has quit after it emerged his staff singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny, President Barack Obama has announced. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had asked for and accepted the resignation of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Acting Commissioner Steve Miller, he said. “I will do everything in my power […]

One of the more irritating historical memes is the preposterous notion that the American Civil War was not “really” about slavery, it was about tariffs and states rights. Fortunately, it is easy to demolish this claim for the historical canard it is. All one has to do is to read the Constitution of the Confederate […]

SAN FRANCISCO _ Dressed in his trademark hoodie and jeans, Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a cross-country road show to pitch his company’s initial public stock offering. Hundreds of institutional investors stood in long lines Monday to pile into a ballroom at New York’s Sheraton Hotel to hear the billion-dollar pitch from the […]

Barack Obama is marking the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death with a campaign suggesting that his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, lacks the guts to have ordered the raid that killed the al-Qaida leader. Infuriated Republicans have hit back by accusing the president of dividing America, calling the campaign “shameless” and accusing Obama of seeking […]

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has ended his bid for the White House, leaving Mitt Romney as the presumptive nominee. The former Pennsylvania senator made the announcement at a news conference in the city of Gettysburg. “While this presidential race is over for me, we are not done fighting,” said Mr Santorum, a social conservative. […]

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney has had a heart transplant and is now recovering in hospital, his office has said. It said the surgery had been carried out on Saturday at the Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. Mr Cheney, 71, has had heart problems for much of his adult life, suffering five heart attacks since […]

Rick Santorum is facing some awkward questions after footage emerged of a radical evangelical preacher opening a campaign rally with calls for all non-Christians to “get out” of America. In the footage, filmed at the Greenwell Springs Baptist Church in Louisiana yesterday, Pastor Dennis Terry told a crowd that anyone who doesn’t worship God should […]

A manager at US banking giant Goldman Sachs in London has quit, saying he could no longer work there “in good conscience”. Greg Smith, who headed Goldman’s equity derivatives business in Europe, said it was common to hear talk of ripping off their “muppet” clients. “The environment now is as toxic and destructive as I […]